Blue Like Jazz

I read this book a long time ago and I’ve noticed the world seems to be catching on. Lots of people I know are talking about it… and that’s an interesting thing to me.

What do I love about this book? It’s honesty. It’s relatability. (Okay.. that’s not a word. But you know what I mean.) Miller wasn’t trying to break any new ground with this book, but what he did do is make it okay to talk about Christianity again, and helped make it easy to talk about Jesus with people who’ve been burned by Christians. That’s a big deal in our culture today.

There are some questionable things (theology-wise) in this book, and every book I’ve ever read has that. It’s a very quick read, but it’s a book you want to absorb. This is not a airplane-ride book. This is a “read it before you go to bed and pick it up the next day over your lunch hour” kind of book. You want to read more, but you want to savor it at the same time. It’s like a good Riesling, right Steph T?

What I liked the most about this book was that it made me realize I’m not alone in my craziness, or my questioning.

And that’s just alright with me.

There is something quite beautiful about the Grand Canyon at night. There is something quite beautiful about a billion stars held steady by a God who knows what he is doing. (They hang there, the stars, like notes on a page of music, free-form verse, silent mysteries swirling in the blue like jazz.) And as I lay there, it occurred to me that God is up there somewhere. Of course, I had always know he was, but this time I felt it, I realized it, the way a person realizes they are hungry or thirsty. The knowledge of God seeped out of my brain and into my heart. I imagined him looking down on this earth, half-angry because his beloved mankind cheated on him, had committed adultery, and yet hopelessly in love with her, drunk with love for for her.